Tag Archives: Richard John Neuhaus

Richard John Neuhaus

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I have endured an avalanche of email on my honoring the late Father Richard John Neuhaus on my program when he passed away on Thursday of this week.

Both callers to the program and emailers have expressed the thought that Richard John Neuhaus had an unbiblical view of salvation through faith by grace alone based on the merits of Christ alone, therefore no genuinely evangelical Christian would see any redeeming value in honoring his memory. That assumption is made because, after all, he converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism in 1990, therefore he could NOT have had a biblical view of salvation.

Here is Richard John Neuhaus in his own words from one of his spiritual writings, Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross.  (Thanks to Russell Moore, dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, for posting this at his blog):

When I come before the judgment throne, I will plead the promise of God in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. I will not plead any work I have done, although I will thank God that he has enabled me to do some good. I will plead no merits other than the merits of Christ, knowing that the merits of Mary and the saints are all from him; and for their company, their example, and their prayers through my earthly life I will give everlasting thanks. I will not plead that I had faith, for sometimes I was unsure of my faith, and in any event that would be to turn faith into a meritorious work of my own. I will not plead that I held the correct understanding of ‘justification by faith alone,’ although I will thank God that that he led me to know ever more fully the great truth that much misundertood doctrine was intended to protect. Whatever little growth in holiness I have experienced, whatever strength I have received from the company of the saints, whatever understanding I have attained of God and his ways…these and all other gifts I will bring gratefully to the throne. But in seeking entry to that heavenly kingdom, I will, with Dysmas, look to Christ and Christ alone.

Persecution: It’s Our Turn

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Two important essays today encouraging the faithful to “prepare your minds for action” (1 Peter 1:13) in anticipation of the coming persecution of U. S. Christians:

Dr. Albert Mohler urges us to “take a careful look” at how homosexual activists are responding to the passage of Proposition 8 in California: “[T]he coercive effect is to punish anyone who will not recognize, endorse, or celebrate same-sex marriages.”

Dr. Richard John Neuhaus warns that “we are heading into a greatly intensified public clash of state power and religious freedom,” for which Christians are ill-prepared. His concluding graph is ominous:

Yes, the imminent Kulturkampf, if that is what is in the offing, will require legal talent, political strategizing, relentless persuasion, and all the other means compatible with our constitutional order. Most of all, however, it requires the courage born of faith that the Church really is the Body of Christ through time, a distinct and public community bearing public witness to public truths about the right ordering of life both public and personal. In Catholic history, the cry through the centuries is for libertas ecclesiae—the freedom of the Church to be the Church. For Catholics and others, that freedom now faces a time of severe testing. In the defense of that freedom there have been through the centuries martyrs beyond numbering. We do not know what will happen in the months and years ahead, except that now it may be our turn.